Meditation is often pictured as this retreat from the stressful world. It’s where you can enjoy your happy place, be relaxed, and not need to worry about work. I don’t know about you, but it is getting more difficult to find that happy place these days with how busy life can be.

This is especially true when it comes to the workplace. People are feeling tired, overwhelmed, and anxious all too often when completing their professional duties. More families are living paycheck to paycheck these days. It leads to burnout, giving up, or complete daily exhaustion.

You can use all of the nutritional programs and gym memberships in corporate wellness all you want. Until the root cause of stress is discovered and treated, however, stress is going to continue leaving you in a mess. Now here’s the best part: you don’t need to wait until you’re feeling stressed out to meditate.

Could meditation help you? Here are a few ways meditation can help all of us decompress after a tough day.

#1. It can handle immediate stress. I’ve often found that acute stress is one of the most difficult aspects of the workplace environment these days. Immediate stress might come from your boss, a co-worker, a client, a customer… no one is immune from acute stress. With regular meditation, you’ll be able to feel more energetic and be less emotionally exhausted from each incident, allowing you to feel more like yourself at the end of the day.

#2. It can be practiced everywhere. You don’t need a little sand garden with a rake to meditate. Believe it or not, you don’t even need to have a regular meditation spot. I try to take one of my breaks every day at work and use it to meditate. I’ll find a quiet room at work, even if it’s the bathroom, and begin some deep breathing exercises. Some days I can use both 15-minute breaks at work. Sometimes I need to use my lunch break. Either way, it helps to get me through each day a lot better.

#3. It keeps you in the moment. Ever clock out at the end of the work day and thought, “Wow! This day flew by so quickly!” That’s what I call the “Autopilot Moment.” Our jobs can become so routine that we zone out and just do what we need to do to earn a paycheck. By incorporating meditation into the daily routine, you can stay in the moment more often, allowing you to be more productive and detailed with your work.

#4. It reduces the amount of sick leave that gets taken. Meditation supports good health, which means you can use your sick leave for more than just mental health holidays.

#5. It can support healthy living habits. One of the ways a lot of people cope with high levels of stress is through eating. Weight gain from stressful eating at work leads to insomnia, which leads to caffeine consumption, which leads to even less sleep… it’s a very destructive cycle. Meditation, over time, can reverse that cycle.

Meditation isn’t a “cure-all” for every workplace-related stressful situation, but it’s daily practice can help you do more than make it through your day. Incorporate it into your schedule for the next week or two and you’ll be able to see if it can make a difference for you.

Have you started a new routine that includes meditation at work? I’d love to hear what has happened since you started meditating!